Megs Kathleen brings working-class grit and generational truth to a poem that urges us to breathe, slow down, and return to ourselves.
There is a quiet intensity to Megs Kathleen’s work, the kind that doesn’t demand your attention so much as settle down beside you, steady and unflinching. A Liverpool based poet with a voice shaped by the grit of working class life and the tender scars of a mother – wound, she writes from the raw edges of experience. Her poetry carries a pulse of survival within a world that too often feels cracked at the seams, yet her line holds a gentleness that never slips into fragility.
Influenced by the restless sprit of the Beatnik generation and the legacy of her late grandfather – himself a published working class poet – Megs work feels both inherited and hard-won. It’s rooted in truths that simmer beneath the surface: the chaos of mental health battles, the shadow of alcoholism, the ongoing fight against right-wing narritives that threaten the communities she belongs to. Her poems don’t flinch, but lean in, searching for honesty even when it stings.
Since stepping onto the Liverpool poetry scene in 2024, Megs Kathleen has become a distinctive presence – a writer who fold vulnerability and defiance into the same breath. She’s currently shaping her first publications, bringing that same raw clarity from the stage to the page.
The poem you are about to meet – Lightly, Darling, sits at the crossroads of compassion and composure. It speaks to anyone caught in the relentless churn of life, those who can never quite find their mellow state or catch their breath. Structured around the notion of delicate chaoes, it offers a reminder to step back, return to yourself, and reclaim a moment of stillness before exhaustion claims it from you.
Through fragments of generational struggle and the quiet hope of escape, Lightly, Darling invites the reader to move gently – lightly – through the calamities of life, and to rediscover a place that feels, finally, like their own.
Lightly, Darling
Lightly, Darling –
You’re running while walking
Crying whilst talking,
You wear your blood as lipstick;
As men compliment your death –
You wear solace so elegantly
For a divine entity of pity.
Lightly, Darling –
You’re trusting whilst falling
Laughing whilst crawling,
You resemble your parents
Each time you meet yourself in the mirror –
And God knows your frightened
Of the two minutes kept
To wash away the
The inferno of night.
So, go lightly darling –
Take it each day as it comes.
And if you run out of lipstick –
You’ve got blood on your teeth
With your soul and your mind and
Everything that comes with it –
No need for Schweppes,
You’re a tonic, little lady.
Keep walking, keep running
Keep dreaming, keep talking,
But go lightly,
Darling
